The brain is a fantastic beast. Works extremely hard to ensure that you don’t really put in too much effort. Its a cognitive miser and it forces you to act like one. Any amount of tough decisions that the brain needs to make, it will find a way to push it forward to a later point in time. Explains why you don’t regularly gym, eat healthy food or just about never end up keeping your new year resolutions.
But what if you could train your brain to be regularly OK with the additional pressures of thinking, imagining and actually doing things that required you to think deeply? What do you truly require to get there? How do you become a much better version of yourself.
Remember the curiosity you had as a kid? Remember how certain problems bothered you for days until you had a solution? Some how as people grow, they seem to value action over thought. May be it is ingrained in their minds that action is doing and thinking, well that is just something that makes you look lazy at work. Over a period of time people just stop thinking deeply about things.
A ton of times when I interview people for a role at PG, I ask them to think about a specific problem and 99% of the times the person just stares back. I suggest that they could run me through how they think about the subject. I usually get blank stares. Over the years the pattern is fairly consistent. A ton of people just don’t even know how to think clearly.
The world needs more thinkers. You. You reading this article. Please learn to think better. Cherish the pain of solving a problem. Savor the joy of connecting the dots. Enjoy the short-lived burst of happiness before you are off to solving other mysteries. Life is a struggle. At least struggle with things that are worthwhile. Think hard.